Sunday, December 7. 2008

These wireless chipsets are commonly found on Dell laptops and many other OEM add-in cards.

Thankfully, the functionality bcmwltry.exe provides has been implemented in the operating system now with the newer service packs. You can simply rename %windir%\system32\bcmwltry.exe to %windir%\system32\bcmwltry.exe.bad without any ill effect. In certain circumstances, the process would leak 2GB+ of RAM within a few hours.

There are reports that the newer versions of the Broadcom drivers do not leak memory with bcmwltry.exe, but I see no reason for keeping the executable around.

You can read other people's trials and tribulations with this here, and here.

I do not try to sound like a Broadcom basher on here, but I am amazed at the amount of issues that have shown up over the past few years related to their wired and wireless drivers. Their hardware seems very solid, and I'm hoping they are working on improving their QA process for software drivers.